Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 246, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1919 — Long-Lived Superstition. [ARTICLE]

Long-Lived Superstition.

We wonder whether the Turkish prisoner who foretold the end of the war by means of the shoulder* blade of a sheep had ever read “Glraldus Cambrensis’ Itinerary Through Wales,” made in the year *IBB. If so, he would have read in Chapter XI “that these people (the Flemings of Pembrokeshire), from the inspection of the right shoulders of rams which have been stripped of their flesh, and not roasted but boiled, can discover future events, or those which have passed and remained long unknown.” A footnote tells us that “this curious superstition Is still preserved In a debased form among the descendants of the Flemish population of this district, where the young women practice a sort of divination with the bliade bone qf a shoulder of mutton to discover who will be their sweetheart. is still more curious that William de Rubruquis, In the thirteenth century, found the same superstition existing among the Tartars.” Now, In the twentieth century, we find tt Among the Turks.—London Chronicle.